Category: selfID

An aristocracy is pulling itself away from the masses in America’s supposedly egalitarian society, writes Matthew Stewart in this masterful article for The Atlantic. By carefully hoarding (among other things) property wealth, social capital, educational opportunities and tax breaks, all of which is combining to consolidate a top 10 percent which believes itself to be meritocratic but whose meritocracy is increasingly hereditary. I won’t rehash the article; read it; whether you’re American or not, if you live in an advanced first world economy you will likely hear resonances of the situation in your own nation – not least because the people in that top 10 per cent could in fact be found in your own country as much as in the USA, as they map fairly straightforwardly onto the Anywheres described by David Goodhart in his book The Road To Somewhere.

I want to use the new aristocracy of Stewart’s piece – Goodhart’s Anywheres – as a starting point for considering the practical impact of the social justice catechism. My thesis is that while this catechism purports to promote egalitarianism, in its practical impact it acts as a form of class warfare that serves both to justify and also to retrench the class interests and cultural homogeneity of this aristocracy. It is, after all, the elite colleges of the USA from which the social justice gospel most pungently emanates, and the gilded young people of America’s new aristocracy would not be glomming so enthusiastically to an ideology that served profoundly to undermine their own class interests. Not even upper-class Communists do that, except in theory.

It’s not an original insight to consider New Left politics as a replacement of class politics with affirmative-action programmes for and by the elite. If anyone else has dissected this in more detail please point me in their direction; I spend most of my time wiping a toddler’s arse and cooking meals for the family so don’t have time to research this in the depth it deserves. I’m just going to list a few of the commonly heard tenets of the social justice gospel and then look at the (usually heavily deprecated and often ferociously silenced) critiques of those positions.

Open borders are a good thing

White privilege and racism are endemic and inescapable

Sexual harassment is the gravest issue facing women today

Feminism must include and make space for men who say they are women

All social justice issues are inextricable from all other social justice issues

I’ll probably look back on this piece in due course and wince, because I can see that some of the thinking needs sharpening yet. But I have limited time to write so I’m just going to plough on and hope for the best. Please consider this a kind of brain dump, feel free to ask difficult questions or point me in the direction of anyone thinking more clearly about it. Anyway, here are some thoughts about the ways in which social justice ideology works particularly well as a form of class-inflected self-interest for the new aristocracy, while presenting itself as the exact opposite.

Open borders are a good thing: Diversity is good. White cultures are crusty, ageing and colonial and benefit from being enriched. We deserve to share our wealth with people from the rest of the world especially as we stole it all from them to begin with. Multiracial societies are intrinsically fairer and better. There’s no such thing as an illegal human. We should dissolve selfish, insular, racist nation states into a global melting pot of free movement and watch justice blossom.

Okay, but what about the working class critique of free movement? Routinely smeared by our top 10% via the cultural mechanisms over which they have near-total control as simple xenophobia, the working class critique of free movement has little to do with racism and everything to do with bargaining power. Put simply, the more people competing for a low-skill job, the lower the wage the worker can command. This is simple economics. So when the top 10% (which runs the country as well as the media through which that country talks to itself) changes the rules so that country sees a rapid growth in the number of low-skilled workers via immigration, are they doing it in order to enrich the culture, or to depress the cost of hiring plumbers, electricians and nannies while pushing up the scarcity value of the home they bought before the migration boom? Beneath the high-minded talk of diversity sits a hard backbone of supply and demand economics that looks suspiciously, on closer inspection, like a consolidation of class interests.

White privilege and racism are endemic and inescapable

My understanding of the position taken by Candace Owens and others is that by entrenching a victimhood narrative within black communities this worldview serves not to free black people but to perpetuate their immiseration, by treating it as immanent and inescapable.

If one considers black people, like women, less as an identity and more as an economic (class) group it’s clear that they are vastly more likely to belong to the 90% than to the 10%. (This also goes for single mothers, by the way). So why not come up with a way of feeling aggrieved on behalf of black people, while also encouraging those black people who don’t belong to the aristocracy to believe themselves incapable of changing their circumstances? Those affirmative action programmes created by well-meaning social entrepreneurs to bridge the gap created by this pervasive state of racism and white supremacy can then also be usefully applied to other members of the 10% – that is, to black people who are already wealthy – thus ensuring moral credentials are burnished without compromising the impermeability of the aristocracy.

In other words, by refocusing the anger of the masses away from issues of class to issues of race, you can ensure ‘representation’ by ethnic minorities within the upper caste and call this ‘social justice’, all the while foreclosing the space for discussing whether the increasingly drastic cleavage between the upper caste and the rest of us is truly the way things should be.

Sexual harassment at work is the gravest issue facing women today

Unless you live in a pretty rarefied world this is just self-evidently untrue. Elsewhere in the world women are raped when they sneak away from work in the fields to take a shit, or have their organs of sexual pleasure cut off as precondition of anyone being able to sell them off to an older husband. How is this not a more important issue facing women today? But instead we amplify the noise about how a movie producer once said something a bit iffy over lunch, or a magazine editor may or may not have touched someone’s bottom during a late-evening meeting, while looking sideways and wringing our hands while mumbling about ‘culture’ while girls and young women are taken overseas to have their genitals sliced with an un-sterile razor or to be forced into sexual servitude, destined forever to obey the every command of a cousin whose language they don’t share.

I can only conclude that this is taking place because the people who lead the narratives on what feminism is aren’t generally the same ones at the sharp end of what life looks like when feminism isn’t in the picture. Nimco Ali is an honourable exception, and there are many others, but there’s still an overwhelming sense of nervous recoil by much of mainstream – that is, socially acceptable – feminism from any willingness to tackle any issue that might be complicated by the ever more baroque dance of identity politics.

Perhaps the most egregious of these turnings-aside exists in the determination of Polite Feminism to ignore the absurd demand of males who wish to wear dresses and behave in a feminine manner to be treated as in every way indistinguishable from biological women. I’ve given that a separate heading though, so let me return to sexual harassment at work. In practice, this serves to create a kind of wilful blindness to the innumerable issues that might be tackled by a feminism that emerged from poor women with jobs, rather than wealthy ones with careers. What might those issues be? We don’t know, because no-one ever gets to hear. I suspect it would focus more on how the buggering hell anyone is supposed to care for vulnerable and dependent loved ones while keeping body and soul together – not on whether or not someone once called you ‘darling’ by the watercooler.

Trans women are women: On the surface, this one seems like a social justice no-brainer. People should be radically free to be whatever they wish to be, right? So if a male bodied person identifies as a woman, he should be recognised as such. It’s a simple issue of social justice, the next frontier in the civil rights movement, a fundamental step to ensure a vulnerable group is protected from abuse at the hands of violent and bigoted men.

But in practice, encoding the nostrum ‘Trans women are women’ in law means the effective legal abolition of biological sex. Now, that doesn’t impact all that much on people at the top but makes things disproportionately worse for women further down the food chain: imprisoned women, abused women in shelters. Women on hospital wards. Suddenly the statutory requirement to keep such spaces penis-free vanishes. Along with the abolition of sex goes any meaningful way of describing sex discrimination; if men can also breastfeed, how is discrimination against breastfeeding mothers in the workplace about sexism? And above all it renders invisible once again the labour that is fundamentally women’s – childbirth and childrearing – because it can no longer be named as a property of women. We can continue to shrug our shoulders at the dilemmas of people who want to work part-time and care for children; that’s not a women’s issue. Nor is miscarriage care. Nor is domestic violence.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that just because something is now a ‘people issue’ rather than a ‘women’s issue’ it will rise in status, because ‘after all men get pregnant too’. You only have to look at the way biological-males-who-say-they-are-women get lauded for career achievements, while biological-females-who-say-they-are-male get lauded for having babies, to realise that this brave new world of supposed gender neutrality retains the same physiological, sexually dimorphic fundamentals as the previous one where we knew what ‘men’ and ‘women’ meant, and all the same rules of sexism still apply. Only now we don’t have words for them any more.

This works as an Anywhere power move because as everyone secretly knows, and no-one really wants to acknowledge, if all the little women – you know, the fat ugly ones who work in the care industry and live in shitty little houses somewhere you’d want to drive through as fast as possible – stopped doing what women everywhere have always done the entire social fabric would collapse. Too much consciousness-raising is a bad thing. So instead, keep it contained. Divert attention from anything that might entail looking too seriously and critically at the way the mass of ordinary women are asked to live. Focus on something that sounds inclusive, kind and sort of ‘feministy’, imposes precisely no costs on your social class and in the process conveniently renders un-nameable a number of the lines of enquiry that might otherwise be pursued by feminists concerned with the mass rather than the elite.

All social justice issues are inextricable from all other social justice issues

The credo of ‘intersectionality’ has in effect consumed all the separate identity politics movements, through the simple medium of asserting that the more identities you have, the more oppressed you are – and (in the popular understanding at least) this functions as a simple points scheme.

(It’s worth noting at this point that socioeconomic class is not usually listed as an Oppressed Identity, despite the transparent persistence of class snobbery even in our supposedly enlightened times. I’m not talking about people like Jacob Rees-Mogg either, I’m talking about – for example – those who sneer at poor people for making political choices that militate against Anywhere class interests).

The identities that do count in the points schemes are all ones that are as available to the wealthy as they are to the poor. Race; transgender identification; religious faith (unless it’s Jewish or Christian); all these are popularly considered axes of oppression. Oppression, we are to infer, happens just as much to the very rich as to the very poor, as long as they are black, Muslim, transgender or whatever. (Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that the most vocal Oppressed Identities are in fact the ones dealing with issues that no-one but the relatively privileged has time to consider, such as ‘Am I non-binary, demiboy or transmasculine?’.) Further, because all social justice issues are inextricable from each other, and ‘intersectionality’ is a totalising doctrine, to demur on any given point either regarding the points system or any of the maxims it promotes renders one excommunicate from the congregation.

This works both to muffle dissent and also to provide an unassailable vantage point and moral high ground from which to attack anyone who objects, for any reason, to any part of the belief system – which, coincidentally, is likely to include many of the people whose class interests are less well-represented by the belief system than your own. And not only can you mobilise people advocating for the social justice issue against which dissent has been voiced, but because of the doctrine of inextricability the rest of the faithful must join in excommunicating the heretic as well.

So taken in its entirety, the social justice form of identity politics (as distinct from that variety, founded on a presumption of Christian/humanist universals, expressed in – for example – the work of Martin Luther King) operates both to articulate the class interests of the new elite, and also in important ways to create a bulwark against competing articulations of class interest, be they black, working-class or female. ‘

Diversity’ functions as an overarching political system and means of distributing resources and power (as set out with blistering clarity in Ben Cobley’s book The Tribe) and also as a means of exerting downward pressure on the wages of the servant class. At the same time, the elite drive to introduce transience into working-class communities serves to degrade the interpersonal systems of solidarity and mutual assistance, grounded in place and relatively stable social values and population, which have traditionally served the poor in place of the financial resources needed to buy in services such as childcare or help for the elderly.

Meanwhile, feminism focuses on the fine points of sexual behaviour in mixed-sex workplaces with desk jobs, at the expense of thornier issues thrown up by – for example – the introduction to our society, via the promotion of that other social justice credo ‘diversity’, of cultures with traditions radically at odds with feminism. The focus on sexual mores serves as a kind of displacement activity, expelling difficult (and in other countries indisputably feminist) issues not immediately pertinent to the elite from feminism into the realm of the ‘far right’. (Because let’s face it, it’s not elite Muslim migrants who are sending their teenage daughters overseas for a forced marriage, it’s the working class ones). It also helps to obscure or banish matters that might otherwise fall into the domain of feminism but are principally working-class issues, such as the many less well-off women who wish they could spend less time at their job and more time with their children, but cannot afford to do so; or the difficulty of creating those local support networks so essential to surviving life with dependent family members, when the culture as a whole considers the labour force as a mass of entirely mobile individuals with no need or desire for local connections, and actively encourages working-class neighbourhoods to become more, not less transient. And just in case the lot of women who can’t buy in the services displaced by the decline in stable communities is not challenging enough, social justice will assert further that not only are sexual mores more important than any other issue to feminism, but that being a woman has no biological component, and therefore women’s refuges, prisons and swimming pool changing rooms should henceforth be effectively sorted by each individual’s inner sense of gender rather than by biological sex. Further again, the entire domain of difficulties encountered by women as a function of being the sex that gestates, bears and nurses children is no longer a women’s issue, because men also have babies, so stop talking about it. And, finally, any critique of any of these matters from the perspective of non-Anywhere class interests will result in your excommunication. If that isn’t starting to smell a lot like class warfare, I’m not sure what is.

Many have ignored the debate so far, seeing it as an arcane internecine spat on the left and good for a chuckle or two, nothing more. But changes to the law on trans issues affect everyone. If you care at all about personal liberty and (relative) freedom from government overreach, here are two reasons why you should oppose ‘self-ID’: firstly, it’s a monstrous power grab by a government already giddy and bloated with the powers it increasingly clutches to itself. And secondly, if this goes through we might as well have done with it and just reinstate blasphemy laws.

It’s a massive government power grab: Effectively the changes replace sex with ‘gender identity’. So what, you might say. But sex is observable: even without peering at genitals humans can identify with near-perfect accuracy whether another human is male or female. Even my 18-month-old can do it and she’s only just learned the words for ‘man’ and ‘lady’. But once someone can declare themselves legally ‘male’ or ‘female’ simply by filling in a form, based on no external factors whatsoever and simply their feeling about what they are, sex stops being an observable property of everyone’s physical selves and becomes ‘gender identity’, an abstract property of everyone’s inner life. At that moment the final arbiter of who is or isn’t male or female stops being the evidence of your and everyone else’s eyes.

In order for ‘gender identity’ to have any meaning, therefore, it needs to be ratified by – guess who? Enter your friendly bureaucratic state. The government will have abolished your sex and given you something called a ‘gender identity’ instead, to which of course only the government can give binding force.

Michael Merrick’s brilliant essay The Labour Family sets out how the same radically individualist concept of ‘liberty’ – articulated on the right in the economic sphere and on the left in the social – placed the state in direct competition with social structures, networks and traditions as the prime means of individuals’ support.

For liberty to flourish the state had to remain neutral toward the conduct of those residing within it. It could dispense justice where contracts were unjustly breached, but the manner in which they were drawn, the manner in which they ended, and the manner in which they affected third parties and society as a whole remained outside the purview of the state. Yet it also needed vigorous protection and a legislative commitment to mitigate the fallout from such self-centred accounts of freedom. This put the state in direct competition with that supportive web of relationships that traditionally regulated individual behaviour as well as helped absorb fallout when required. In providing an alternative to these networks, in rendering associative, reciprocal, mutualistic society no longer at the core of individual progress and preservation, the state had begun to monopolise the space where society used to be. The result was corrosive to any sort of relational politics; a system with a focus on outcomes, as Ruth Porter explains, ‘removes any connection between action and consequence. In doing so, it destroys the very reflex which encourages moral action. By consequence, this breeds a sense of entitlement. This undermines social bonds both in families and also communities more broadly.’

The paradox in the dynamic outlined above is that in order for liberty – understood in a strictly individualistic sense – to flourish, the state increasingly took the place of the customs and networks that had traditionally regulated behavour, thus growing – in the name of freedom – ever bigger.

In a traditionally understood concept of identity, each of us is recognised by those around us as those things we are, in the social sphere: a mother, a husband, a writer, a daughter, a good cook, a teller of jokes, etc. Without that social recognition, that echo returning from the Other that says ‘I see you, and yes, I agree with you that you are [that thing you feel you are]’, each person’s inner feeling about who or what she is can be nothing but empty yearning.

But in the radical individualist new world we are entering, each person’s inner feeling of personal identity is not only paramount but the only truth. Interpellation by the other is, we are told, rendered null and void. Only thus can each individual be freed from the oppressive social gaze to flourish as the unique marvel he or she (or ze or hir or whatever) is.

But there’s a catch. If it’s not the people around me who affirm my identity, it has to happen somewhere. So naturally, again, the state steps in. Much as the state stepped in to create government-sanctioned structures intended to replace those stifling social networks and conventions that had hitherto regulated behaviour, here again in the name of freedom the state gets even bigger.

The proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act are as colossal a power grab by the state as the proposal to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in. Not only does the state propose to own my physical organs by default, it also proposes to become the ultimate arbiter – over the heads of all those around me and even of observable truth – of whether I am male or female. Not content with inserting itself between individuals and their social spheres, the state must insert itself between us and our very sex, arrogating to itself the right to determine the truth of something which is in fact inscribed in every cell of our bodies.

Secondly, blasphemy. Think I’m joking? Consider this: once the government is established as the final – the only – arbiter of whether I am male or female, then disagreeing with the government’s view that this person or this person or this person are, in fact, women represents an assault on government power. I don’t get to argue with the government about what the rate of income tax is, and if the government says person X is a woman, then they are a woman. Combine that with hate speech rules (which have already shown an alarming degree of mission creep) and you have a situation where refusing to tell lies that have been sanctioned by the state as the truth could land me with a fine or in jail. If that isn’t a de facto blasphemy law I don’t know what is. Indeed in a recent court case where a young trans-identified male, ‘Tara’ Wolf was convicted of assaulting a 60-year-old woman, the judge reduced the fine and declined to award compensation because the victim did not always refer to her male attacker using female pronouns.

To be clear, I don’t really care how people dress or present themselves. I think the world would be a nicer place if we didn’t set quite so much store by whether someone was wearing a frock or makeup or whatever. I’ll even call a man ‘she’ out of politeness, if politeness is warranted. But a dress, hormone supplementation or cosmetic surgery don’t alter someone’s actual sex. The state has no place insisting otherwise. Nor does the state have any place announcing that in fact sex is irrelevant and that to help us be freer it will helpfully supply and manage for each of us a new tailored and oh-so-individual gender identity. But as that awful Breitbart man once said, politics is downstream from culture; the push in our culture continues to be away from the social (relationally understood) toward the radically individualised; I fear many of us will be blaspheming before this phenomenon works itself out.